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A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

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Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#371

Post by wilsonnb »

wutbrodo wrote: post #362
wilsonnb wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was using Gnome on Fedora for a while but I switched to Windows 10 a few months ago and can't say I've had any problems with the UX. Window snapping works. Minimizing windows works. You can do that thing where it shows a small version of everything you have open on both (win+tab on Win10, don't remember the Gnome shortcut). Recommending Linux to someone over Windows seems insane to me unless that person is literall…

> unless that person is literally just using a web browser for everything or they are a developer This describes the personal desktop usage of all of almost every single person I know. I put my dad on Linux Mint almost a decade ago, because regular tech support got much more difficult once I moved away for college. The calls for help got cut down by a factor of 10 after the switch. Its made some strides, but at least…

I hear people make claims like this all the time on hacker news and reddit, and I just don't get it.

The only way I can see someone who knows nothing about computers experiencing 10x less issues by switching from Windows to Linux is because they use their computer 10x less or the person they go to for tech support knows Linux better than they know Windows.

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#372

Post by kyledrake »

kyledrake wrote: post #303
youseecomrade wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it has to keep up with Gnome/GTK too. I heard it's not easy.

There's apparently been some improvements to HiDPI in this release for Xubuntu, which is giving me hope it works better now. https://xubuntu.org/release/18-04/

For future travelers, this is how you fix Xubuntu for HiDPI: https://askubuntu.com/questions/652021/adapt-font-and-icon-s...

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#373

Post by quantum_magpie »

philliphaydon wrote: post #188

What is preventing linux from having the visual polish that windows and OS X has???

As someone who uses LXDE daily for the past 9 years, and who has a gaming Windows setup, I can tell wholeheartedly that the only thing worse than visual polish of Windows is the GNOME3 and Unity DE's. I also had on couple occasions the misfortune of using OSX, and god it was absolutely horrid. As in, Windows level of bad.

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#374

Post by fus »

didibus wrote: post #135
setquk wrote: post #82

I'm not mincing my words here but Gnome 3 is just an unpolishable turd and needs to go away. It's just trying to be original and clever but has missed the mark so incredibly far that makes it the most frustrating thing possible to use on a daily basis. I have tried on and off for 2 years and it is just eye gouging pain to use. I crawl back to xubuntu and XFCE in the end every time as it does the service of getting ou…

I don't hate it, but KDE Plasma is so good, that I can't use anything else anymore. I recommend others to try. Also, shout out to OpenSuse if you want a good KDE distro.

Made a fresh reinstall of Kubuntu 18.04 (previously I had Kubuntu 16.04 on my primary desktop). Everyting works, drivers were detected (including nvidia). Multiscreen setup works, no DPI problems, fonts are clear, performance is better. Default plasma setting are way better than 16.04. Experience is very smooth. Disclaimer: I'm not using sleep/hibernate, so no comment there.

BTW: it seems that most of binaries are being build as PIE, which also becomes the default mode for gcc (-pie/-no-pie).

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#375

Post by bitwize »

danShumway wrote: post #261
wilsonnb wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was using Gnome on Fedora for a while but I switched to Windows 10 a few months ago and can't say I've had any problems with the UX. Window snapping works. Minimizing windows works. You can do that thing where it shows a small version of everything you have open on both (win+tab on Win10, don't remember the Gnome shortcut). Recommending Linux to someone over Windows seems insane to me unless that person is literall…

I run Windows 10 on a Surface Pro 3 because Linux touch support is just too bad right now and because I have maybe two essential applications that don't run on Linux. I would switch it over in a heartbeat if I could, I think the UX is really bad, it's a nightmare for me to maintain. I hate that the updates are so pushy; I boot into the computer maybe two or three times a month and pretty much every time it wants me t…

Obviously you're not using LTSB, which is what any sensible Windows 10 user would do.

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#376

Post by kingosticks »

pnutjam wrote: post #161
reacweb wrote: post #35

I have a desktop. The first thing I test after installation of Ubuntu is the remote access using ssh, then the wakeonlan, then the remote access using vnc (already painful with 16.04), then the sharing of hard disk directories. Finally, I test the playback of BD and CD. I do not need much customization: ensure that the alt key is not blocked and works fine with photoshop. On the desktop, I will probably only remove t…

Switch your remote access to x2go, you'll thank me.

What's the benefit? The best I previously found was nomachine since it has clients for everything. But it's still so laggy over a remote connection, maybe I'm doing something wrong.

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#377

Post by metalliqaz »

lobo_tuerto wrote: post #267
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only we lived in a world where developers could just distribute their application binaries to the end user without having to rely on a storefront.

SourceForge?

Whenever I find an application hosted on SourceForge, I assume it is abandoned.

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#378

Post by wutbrodo »

wilsonnb wrote: post #371
wutbrodo wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unless that person is literally just using a web browser for everything or they are a developer This describes the personal desktop usage of all of almost every single person I know. I put my dad on Linux Mint almost a decade ago, because regular tech support got much more difficult once I moved away for college. The calls for help got cut down by a factor of 10 after the switch. Its made some strides, but at least…

I hear people make claims like this all the time on hacker news and reddit, and I just don't get it. The only way I can see someone who knows nothing about computers experiencing 10x less issues by switching from Windows to Linux is because they use their computer 10x less or the person they go to for tech support knows Linux better than they know Windows.

To be honest, I'm just as baffled in the other direction. Have you ever seen a Linux Mint system? It's hardly Gentoo. What problems are you imagining, once the setup is completed? (It should be obvious that I didn't hand my dad a Live USB and say "good luck"). Installing software is simple, safe search and click in something named "software center". Updates are the same. Performance tends to be much better.

For a non tech savvy user: How do you install software on Windows? How do you avoid viruses if you're not savvy enough to intuitively pick up on which sites and emails are legit and which are malicious[1]? How do you stop 500 random programs from slowing the crap out of your computer by autostarting and running in the taskbar? This is leaving aside the piss-poor performance of the actual OS itself, which certain tech-savvy people handle by fretting about antivirus programs and the necessity of defragmentation. Go far back enough and you can't even dismiss the former of these concerns offhand, while with Linux, "don't worry about viruses" is an accurate enough directive. I could've said the same for Windows, but the collateral damage would be the very useful "don't download random software from random shady sites". For fuck's sake, at one point Windows had a virus that could infect your system _without even being opened_ (if attached to an email that was opened in Outlook).

Aside from setting up his system, which I'd have to do anyway, I struggle to think of a single problem my dad has had in the ten years since he's switched that wasn't an unforced error that he'd do on any system (ie accidentally changing some setting like screen magnification and being unable to find his way back).

I'm actually really curious about your answers to the above overarching question, because I similarly can't imagine what computing universe you live in that is remotely similar to the one I live in.

[1] some interesting research out of MSR sometime back indicated that bad grammar and other obvious tells in scam emails were actually _intentional_, in that they filtered out all but the least savvy users, who'd have the highest percentage of susceptibility during the more labor-intensive subsequent stages of the scamming process.

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#379

Post by abenga »

VMG wrote: post #107
setquk wrote: post #82

I'm not mincing my words here but Gnome 3 is just an unpolishable turd and needs to go away. It's just trying to be original and clever but has missed the mark so incredibly far that makes it the most frustrating thing possible to use on a daily basis. I have tried on and off for 2 years and it is just eye gouging pain to use. I crawl back to xubuntu and XFCE in the end every time as it does the service of getting ou…

Just to balance this out: I suspect for every passionate Gnome-3-hater there are 10 users who think it's fine.

Not just fine, it's the best desktop environment I've ever used. KDE (and most of its apps) is too "busy", too many options to tweak and configure, too many buttons and widgets all over the place. I don't care about the DE, I don't want to see the task bar, I don't want widgets and active areas on my desktop background, I want to open my IDE/browser/terminal/whatever and get to work. Gnome does this, let me launch stuff and stay out of the way.

Most of the annoyances mentioned on the review can be altered using the Tweak tool or have extensions that change the behavior anyway.

To each his own, though. I don't understand why people like the OP find it impossible to imagine that other people are fine with, or even actually love, Gnome 3.

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#380

Post by [deleted] »

gnufied wrote: post #137
sz4kerto wrote: post #89

LTS. Meanwhile Gnome Shell is leaking memory like hell and it has bugs that've been open for 5 years and are marked as 'critical'. ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1... and the rest)

I am running gnome-shell on 3 desktops and my current session is running for days and memory usage is stable around 230MB. The leak as discussed in the bug comes from certain extensions. I do not think it qualifies as leaks as "hell".

[deleted]
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